The Cover of Transformations in Pain
WITH MATTHEW LEDREW

He sits at the large black desk in his office, a look of stern concentration on his face as drags a lead pencil along the edge of a long, metal ruler. Sighing, he leans back to examine his work.

His name is Matthew LeDrew, and he's designing the cover to the fourth Black Womb book, Roulette.

"In some ways, the cover is the hardest part." LeDrew admits, tossing down his pencil. "There's a learning curve to it. Ever since the first book was created they've all followed the same basic design... but it can still be a headache and a half."

This was the first image ever created with the intention of being a cover of Transformations in Pain . It preceeds the others by years, its completion date being in early September, 2004.

"I usually dig these old covers, but not this one. The whole 'floating heads' thing is lazy and very cliche. You also can't really tell what's happening. It's supposed to be Cathy turning around and looking over her shoulder in fear a Grendel behind her, illustrating her great emotionally-driven plot that continues from the first book. Tranformations in Pain is very Cathy-centric, and this cover does illustrate that.

"Where it falls apart is with the heads. Mikes' nose is all wrong, Grendel looks like an evil twenty-something rather than a high-schooler and the Womb just doesn't look right. Plus, what's with the lines in the backround?

"There are some highlights. Sud's expression (bottom left) is nice, and (as always) I miss that the Womb-symbol (seen top right) wasn't in the final design

"This cover was created back when I was thinking about designing the series as a comic book. Even if I had gone that route, this one wouldn't have been used."

This was the second image created with the intention of being the cover to Transformations in Pain. It too preceeds the others by many years, its completion date being in September of 2004.

"Now this is more like it. This is another cover from back in the day when I was envisioning the Black Womb series as comics or graphic novels. What seperates this one from the previous one is that I love it.

"I've had this one up on my personal website for a while. For those of you that don't know, it's a homage to a Daredevil comic by Frank Miller which featured the debut of Elektra. Certain liberties were taken to change it of course, but the Womb is pretty much in Dareveil's position and Spider is pretty much in Elektra's.

"If I had done the series as a comic, this would definitely have gone in. Thankfully I didn't go that route with it. That said, there were two things going against having this as the cover to Transformations in Pain: a) homages are a generally accepted part of the comic-book medium, but create tedious legal issues when in the novel world. b) there was a certain cover scheme started with the publication of Black Womb, and this just doesn't fit it.

"That said, I'm glad the web allows me to have a place to show it off."

This was the third image created with the intention of being the cover to Transformations in Pain. It was sketched in November of 2007.

"What can I say about this one? I can tell you that it's blown up from being the size of a matchbook, if that helps.

"There's one of these for every book. It's basically a thumbnail so that I can see if the image I have in my head will work with our existing scheme. Which, of course, it did.

"One thing of note is that the claws are drawn differently here. I'd been talking with a friend of mine named Adam Bruce and he'd mentioned that he pictured the claws differently than I did. I picture the claws coming out from the finger, he pictures the clas actually being the finger itself. This design is closer to what they would have looked like if I'd gone his route."

This was the forth and final image created with the intention of being the cover to Transformations in Pain. It was completed in December of 2007, finally.

"Here it is, the final design to Transformations in Pain . Chances are if you're this deep into the site you've seen it once or twice already, but on the off chance that you haven't, take a gander.

"It's by no means my finest work, but I like it all the same. If I had my time back I probaby would've removed the ripped paper under the letter 'P'. Also, because the word 'Pain' is so big, a lot of people make the mistake of thinking that's the whole title.

"All in all, a great finished product with a much more steam-lines production process than Black Womb . A definite success."